$ cat manifesto.md - Why we built Kunobi

Why Kunobi

Kubernetes tooling wasn't built for the way we work today.

The problem

Debugging a failing pod shouldn't require five tools.

But that's how it works today. You start in kubectl, tail some logs, open a dashboard to see the resource tree, check your Helm release history in another tab, then copy YAML into ChatGPT because you're not sure what that annotation does. By the time you find the issue, you've lost 20 minutes to context switching.

Existing tools don't help. They either give you a pretty UI with no real power, or a powerful CLI with no guidance. They don't talk to each other. They don't know what's running in your cluster. And the ones that bolt on AI just wrap kubectl in a chat window and call it innovation.

We got tired of this. So we built something different.

What Kunobi actually does

Nothing installed on your clusters.

No agents, no operators, no sidecars. Kunobi connects through your existing kubeconfig — the same way kubectl does. Your clusters stay untouched.

One window, not twelve tabs.

Resources, logs, terminal, diagnostics, all in one place. No more bouncing between tools to answer one question.

Native desktop app, not another Electron blob.

Built with Tauri. Starts fast, stays light. Credentials live in your system keychain, not in browser storage. Your data stays local unless you decide otherwise. No cloud account required.

Multi-cluster from day one.

Switch contexts, compare states, see what's deployed where. Flux and Argo are first-class citizens, not plugins.

Try it without a cluster.

No kubeconfig? No problem. Spin up a demo cluster from inside Kunobi and explore a fully working GitOps environment in minutes.

MCP server for external AI tools.

Kunobi exposes read-only cluster access to tools like Claude Code. Your AI assistant can understand your infrastructure without you copying YAML back and forth.

Why we built it

We're engineers at Zondax. We've spent years building infrastructure tooling across blockchain, cloud, and developer platforms. We know what it's like to manage complex systems at 2am when something breaks. Kunobi is the tool we wanted to use. So we built it.

Meet the team and see what's next on our company page.

We built Kunobi because we wanted a K8s tool we'd actually enjoy opening. Turns out, when you design for understanding instead of just monitoring, everything gets simpler.

The Kunobi Team

Ready to try it?

Download Kunobi and connect your first cluster in minutes.